Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies, vol. 1 (review)

Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies. Vol. 1. Edited by Bennett Zon. (Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain.) Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1999. [xix, 324 p. ISBN 1-84014-259-6. $72.95.]

This book comprises fifteen papers given at the first conference of the Society for the Study of Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, held at the University of Hull in July 1997. As is inevitably the case with such collections, the papers reproduced here vary in quality and do not form a series linked by a common thread or perspective beyond that of their geographical and temporal focus. Nonetheless, Bennett Zon's enterprise in organizing the conference (which has been followed by two more held at the University of Durham) and publishing this volume deserves recognition and praise. As Nicholas Temperley notes in his foreword, the cause of British music has been transformed since he started his own doctoral work in the fifties, when Thurston Dart thought he was mad and "more moderate advisers thought I was indulging in a gesture of rebellion which would cost me my career" (p. xvii).

The papers cover a wide variety of subjects, from the overarching (Temperley's keynote address, titled "Xenophilia in British Musical History") to the highly specific (Allan Atlas's paper on concertina sales in winter 1851), although this is very much a volume on musical life in Britain rather than British music. Several papers may be cited as informative and stimulating. Temperley's address poses essential questions about why the British seemed so inordinately fond of foreign music and musicians in the nineteenth century and when the "Renaissance" really started. His (inevitably) brief answers give food for thought about two of the most intractable issues faced by scholars in this area. Other papers falling into this category are those by Zon ("History, Historicism and the Sublime Analogy"), David Golby ("Violin Pedagogy in England during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, or The Incompleat Tutor for the Violin"), and Simon McVeigh ("The Benefit Concert in Nineteenth-Century London: From 'Tax on the Nobility' to 'Monstrous Nuisance'"), all of which cover interesting areas and add to our understanding of British musical life. Golby, for example, demonstrates well how aspiring British violinists were faced with inadequate and unfocused tuition, a circumstance that led to an inevitable preference for foreign musicians and the complementary failure to improve matters at home; after all, why bother training people for a socially dubious profession when foreigners can be imported instead? McVeigh's paper deals with the ups and downs of the benefit concert and alludes similarly to the commercial pressures that drove much of British musical life and led concert promoters to pander to the whims of those commanding the highest fees and those holding the purse strings.

Other papers worthy of attention are Jeremy Dibble's on Hubert Parry as historiographer, Trevor Herbert's on the Cyfartha Brass Band, Philip Olleson's on Samuel Wesley, Peter Horton's on Samuel Sebastian Wesley (the only chapter that deals directly with the music of a British composer), Stuart Campbell's on musical life in Glasgow in the 1870s, Caroline Wood's on musicmaking in Yorkshire, Barbara Mohn's on the personification of Christ in British oratorios, and Catherine Dale's on the emergence of a British analytical tradition (principally that of Donald Francis Tovey). These papers focus on very specific areas, and in many cases I would have found it useful if the authors had been able to expand somewhat further on the significance of their investigations. For example, Parry's historiographical writings reflect, as Dibble demonstrates, many of Parry's own aesthetic beliefs, and it would have been splendid to see, if only fleetingly, how Dibble believes these views might have influenced the ethos of the Royal College of Music. Similarly, Caroline Wood's paper on music at Burton Constable (less than ten miles from the conference venue) contains much useful and interesting documentation but would have benefited from placement...